Agenda

Welcome and introductions Health & Safety Community Engagement and Media Communications Archive Consultation Historic Environment Records HERDS Update AOB: December meeting - Birmingham HS2 Archive Consultation

Vision: To tell the story of a nation

Create a highly accessible and outstanding archival legacy that will be developed and promoted What could the HS2 archive be?

Inspirational, engaging, innovative

Inaccessible, forgotten, irrelevant Archiving at high speed

Three elements

Artefacts / hard copy records

- stored, curated
- accessible, used

Digital data

- stored, curated
- accessible, used

The HS2 Virtual Collection:

- Innovation What are our options for the artefacts?

- Local deposition

- Shared deposition

- Single site deposition Consultation sequence

- Developing collateral

- Issue pre-consultation documentation

- Museum scoping workshop

- Feedback and report

- ??? second consultation or targeted engagement

- Announce strategy HS2

HERDS update Recent contractor Round Tables

Specific Objectives and methods review (contractor presentations)

- Predictive modelling
- Assessment of knowledge gaps/ defining areas of potential

Mitigation

- Decision making and HERDS objectives
- The HS2 route in context
- Criteria for decision making Recent contractor Round Tables

Community Engagement

• Work to date – Euston, Birmingham, Heritage Open days, diverse range of people engaged • Future opportunities (including beyond urban centres) • Mechanisms for engaging with people • Capturing feedback, and evaluating strategies Varying levels of activity and assessing ‘blank’ areas

1. Identification - some periods/activities more visible than others
2. Past fieldwork/recording biases
3. Some techniques better at identifying certain types of activity over others
4. Some locations may have been more intensively settled than others.
5. Some areas may have less visible archaeology for certain periods over others
6. ‘Known unknowns’ Types of archaeology and visibility Less visible archaeology: developing fieldwork strategies

• Exploring the location of Palaeolithic deposits and reconstructing past environments

• Identifying settlement location and developing models for settlement patterns for the Mesolithic, Neolithic and Early Bronze Age

• Identifying evidence for late Roman occupation and any continuity with the Early Medieval period Approaching less visible archaeology

- Reviewing works undertaken to date
- Predictive modelling
- Plotting existing data by period, defining ‘blanks’
- Fieldwalking vs test pitting
- Archaeological character areas (stratified random sampling) vs Arbitrary sampling units (irrespective of zones)
- Palaeo-environmental and geo-archaeology techniques
- Route Wide Project Plans being considered